Collins Improve Your Writing Skills. Graham King

and everyone seemed to understand what they did. Now it is not so simple, and advertisements for jobs in education and social welfare contain more verbocrap than in any other field of human endeavour. Here’s some impenetrable prose about a home for teenagers:

       The aim of the home is to enable older young people who still have substantial emotional and personal deficits to make planned progress towards personal autonomy.

      Even among social workers this is garbled nonsense. Surely no professional catastrophe will happen if we simply say: to enable teenagers with troubled personalities to learn to cope for themselves . . . However, lacking in fashionable jargon, the rewrite would probably result in the original writer having a job security deficit.

      The following example, from a publication of the former Inner London Education Authority, characterises the worst kind of jargon abuse:

      Due to increased verbalization the educationist desires earnestly to see school populations achieve cognitive clarity, auracy, literacy and numeracy both within and without the learning situation. However the classroom situation (and the locus of evaluation is the classroom) is fraught with so many innovative concepts (e.g. the problem of locked confrontation between pupil and teacher) that the teaching situation is, in the main, inhibitive to any meaningful articulacy. It must now be fully realized that the secondary educational scene has embraced the concept that literacy has to be imparted and acquired via humanoid-to-humanoid dialogue. This is a break-through. [and a load of jargon!]

      Multicultural muddle

       . . . experience of managing a multicultural urban environment and the ability to integrate equalities considerations into areas of work activity.

      This passage, from an advertisement for a Deputy Director of Social Services, is a real polysyllabic mess. Multicultural urban environment, despite modern delicacies, simply means racially-mixed part of town. Integrate here may mean build in, or it may have been misused to mean include.

      Every trade and profession is entitled to its own jargon – up to a point. So let us allow that equalities is readily understood among social services people as meaning equal treatment regardless of race, sex and, probably, physical handicaps – although the singular equality serves the purpose as well, or better.

      That passage, converted into plain English, could read:

       . . . experience of dealing with a racially-mixed town area and ability to ensure that equality is part of departmental life.

      The same advertisement also required ability to organise intervention in the community to establish the needs of potential service users. Meaning, presumably, ability to go out to discover what people need us to do.

      Social workers do not have the field to themselves, when it comes to jargon. An advertisement for a health worker in Brazil announced:

       You will assist the team in formulating and implementing a health policy, evaluating and developing appropriate responses to specific health problems in indigenous areas . . .

      Meaning? Let’s try to translate: You will help to plan and carry out a policy to deal with health problems among local people. Such a simplification may create a problem, however; to jargon-hardened health workers the revised job description sounds as though it’s less important and so worth only half the salary of the inflated version.

      Computerspeak and Psychobabble

      As computing has evolved from cult to mass culture we can no longer ignore the jargon that computers have generated. Even quite young children are now familiar with dozens of terms: floppy, prompt, menu, boot, megahertz, toolbar, drag and drop hold no terrors for them. However some of the worst offences against the English language pour in an unending stream from the computer world:

       Driven and focused by seeing the world from the customer’s perspective, we continue to build an organisation where quality is embedded in every aspect of endeavour . . . our continued growth in the network computing industry mandates that we now identify and attract the most talented and creative sales and marketing professionals . . .

      Mandates? This announcement sounds as if it were written by someone whose dictionary had a bad coffee stain on the relevant entry.

      Is writing jargon and management-speak more difficult than writing plain English? Many examples suggest that it is, yet its devotees persist in working harder than they need to. Whoever wrote this job description in an advertisement for a BBC position deserved his Golden Bull award: The BBC seeks a Human Resources Assessment Technologist, Corporate Management Development. But jargonising also offers a lazy way out. Here’s a press release about a forthcoming conference, put out by the Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain, which deserves full marks for sloth:

       Conjoint Family Therapy, demonstration/participation workshop. This is a demonstration/participation workshop illustrating 20 to 30 ‘ways of being’ as therapist (i.e. ‘self as instrument’/strategies/techniques) presented from an experiential-Gestalt/communications skills/learning theory/whatever else philosophical viewpoint. Emphasis is on experiencing . . . family/therapist/participant/self, the several modalities, strategies, values, processes, procedures, goals, dangers, fears, avoidance, growth and excitement of conjoint interaction.

      The author of that psychobabble should be made to stand in a corner and study an advertisement written in 100% plain English:

       KITCHEN DESIGNER (Trainee considered) for thriving Chelsea studio. Drawing experience essential. Salary negotiable dependent on experience. If you are aged 20-30, educated to at least A-level standard, have a bright personality, thrive on hard work and are happy to work Saturdays, tell me about yourself by leaving a message on my Ansaphone, not forgetting to leave your name and phone no, or write a brief CV to . . . .

      Bright. Un-pompous. Direct. And, above all, clear!

      The Jargonaut’s Lexicon

      Here’s a list of jargon words and phrases that comply with the former US president Harry S Truman decree: ‘If you can’t convince ‘em, confuse ‘em’. The entries are graded with [J] symbols; the more elusive and impenetrable the jargon, the more [JJJs] it earns. Learn to recognise jargon, and avoid it if you can.

      accentuate [j] stress

      accessible [j] As in We intend making Shakespeare accessible to the millions. Use understandable, attractive

      accommodation [j] Use home, where you live

      accomplish [j] As in accomplish the task. Use complete, finish, do

      accordingly [j] Use so

      accountability [j] Use responsibility

      acquiesce [j] Use agree

      acquire [j] Use get, buy, win

      activist [j] As in Liberal Party activist. Use worker, campaigner

      address [j] As in we must address the problem. Use face, tackle, deal with

      adequate [j] Use enough

      axiomatic [j] Use obvious

      belated [j] Use late

      blueprint [jj] As in the proposal is a blueprint for disaster. Use this will end in, means/could mean disaster

      chair/chairperson [jj] Use chairman, chairwoman

      challenged